“We have to turn it around,” Joe Girardi said Tuesday/Sunday/Friday/last Wednesday. “We can’t feel sorry for ourselves. We can’t worry about where we are in the division. We just have to play better.”

“We have an opportunity to come out every day and right the ship,” Brett Gardner said Tuesday/Saturday/Thursday/last month. “I’m confident it’s going to happen.”

Of course they’re confident it’s going to happen. It’s why they’re big leaguers. If they were anything less than confident that tomorrow’s going to be better, and the next day better still, they wouldn’t be big leaguers, they’d be the rest of us, griping about big leaguers.

Still …

They say we’re young and we don’t know

We won’t find out until we grow…

True to the plot, they are able to add a little something extra to each day’s adventures so while every outcome is the same, and while they wake up in Punxsutawney every morning, this 4-1 loss to the Orioles was a little bit different than the 8-7 loss to the Red Sox on Sunday and a little bit different than the 3-2 loss to the Rangers last week … even though, end of the day, it feels exactly … the … same …

“This is a collection of underperformance,” GM Brian Cashman had said before the game. “That can self-correct organically.”

Or it can regenerate just as organically, and repeat itself, one day after another, one game after another. This time, it wasn’t so much Luis Severino’s arm that had the Yankees worried as his glove; he dropped two throws to first base including one that scored the go-ahead run.

(Though it was his arm that also allowed an assortment of bombs and missiles all over Camden Yards, some of which found Yankees defenders, two of which, hit by Mark Trumbo, nearly found different ZIP codes.)

This time, the chief concern after another enfeebled one-run, seven-hit non-performance on offense wasn’t another game when it seemed the Yankees stepped into the batter’s box waving squash racquets, but rather the moment when Alex Rodriguez, two-thirds of the way to first base as he was grounding out in the fifth, subtly pulled up.

Girardi saw it. Quietly, he hoped it was just Rodriguez conceding the out and conserving energy. But the way things go around the Yankees these days, that would have meant a fundamental karmic alteration.

“Are you OK?” Girardi asked.

“My hammy’s tight,” A-Rod replied.

And later, though Rodriguez tried to say positive things and project positive thoughts, his glum demeanor told you all you needed to know: He’s worried about what they’ll find in the MRI tube Wednesday.

“I’m hopeful for the best,” said the Yankees’ hottest hitter (who is also, for the record, a .194 hitter, which sums everything up pretty perfectly at this point).

So the Yankees fell to 8-16, eight games south of .500 for the first time since 2007. You may remember ’07: The Yankees were 21-29 through 50 games and 14 ½ games behind the Red Sox. They soon won 12 out of 13, and were 56-28 after July 1, and it was exactly the kind of model that’s been useful whenever they’ve stumbled out of the gate or suffered through extended losing streaks …

But that team was in its 12th straight year of making the playoffs. There was muscle memory on that team, and lots of great players in their primes, and it surprised nobody when they wound up only two games back of the Sox, comfortably ensconced in the wild card.

This team? This team, early as it is, yes: That kind of recovery would be surprising.

“There’s nothing any of us can do about April,” Girardi had said before the game. “We believe in them. They’re good players. They’re not playing well but they’re good players. Just go out and do your job.”

They tried, again, just as they did on Sunday, and Friday, and last Wednesday, and against the A’s and Mariners. They failed, again. Not enough pitching. Not enough hitting. Not enough lucky breaks or lucky bounces ….

Don’t let them say your hair’s too long

’Cause I don’t care, with you I can’t go wrong

Someone really needs to smash that alarm clock. Although, the way things are going, they’ll probably only foul it off.